Anyway, the show's not gone, I was just more itinerant than usual. Didn't have a desk and a quiet room very often.

This is a long episode, partially as penance and partially because I really, really missed doing it. I talk about all the misadventures I got up to in Southern California, fatigue, spiritual dread, all my fun themes you've come to know and tolerate. I also cover my favorite music and movies of the year, and generally talk about as much as I'm capable of talking about anything I'm capable of talking about anymore. I get into the Vanity Fair pieces and all that too.

I changed the artist tag on the mp3. It's not Horton/Murphy anymore. It's just me, Kaleb Horton. Not a selfish move, I just realized there's no scenario where this thing ever has a steady co-host again. A wistful thing to realize, but hey. Gotta be honest with yourself. If that means you can't find it on iTunes or something gets screwed up somewhere for any reason, please let me know.

The show needs hosting money. If you feel like donating, and it would sure be nice if you did, then I'll definitely do more episodes, wherever I wind up and whoever I wind up with, even if it's nobody. My PayPal is thelastexitshow@gmail.com, as always. It'd be much appreciated.

Here are some articles I did since I was gone. There are more, but I'm tired. I interviewed Dave Alvin and Joey Harris and Nathan Fielder and went ghost hunting and generally didn't sleep enough.

The show returns after almost three months in the wilderness. Lots of informative discussion about every lousy search term that has ever gotten any Google traction, from Kanye West to whatever the other ones are.

As always, I'm broke. If you like the show, the best way to help it is to throw money at it. It'd definitely make me try to do the show more. I have a PayPal: thelastexitshow@gmail.com. I promise to spend most of it on [ADD WHIMSICAL JOKE HERE THAT LOWERS THE STAKES OF ASKING FOR MONEY].

P.S. I'm looking for a good way to take Skype guests that doesn't involve other people sending me audio which I then have to stitch in manually. That's too much of a time suck. Please email me through the usual channels if there's a good way to do that on Windows.

Sketch: Kaleb and James team up to commit the perfect murder. Features a cameo from somebody on Twitter who I won't name, strictly to be discreet for the time being.

Show: Kaleb talks about the boy's latest vices, L.A., the middle of nowhere, and existential collapse. Also, a dramatic reading of his very real and very funny Big Bang Theory spec, which CBS still refuses to acknowledge. You can read the whole thing over here.

Sketch: Big Jim Murphy makes his triumphant return to the scripted portion of the program in a scene where Kaleb hops a train. He's running from somebody. But who, right? Who's he running from? That's the suspense that drives the scene, see.

Show: No matter how self-loathing I may get in my moments of darkness, I am figuring out how to keep it funny as a one-man act, and I aim to get there one of these days. But in the meantime I'll settle for being a cut-rate picaresque leading man.

I talk about drought. About the central valley and the whole working-class California thing. I talk about William Shatner somehow. I talk about rambling off to an assortment of small towns. I talk about Mark Twain and Bret Harte - the dead guy, not the wrestler - and Rip Van Winkle and all this other old stuff, because I'm being suffocated by my books. Someday my books will kill me.

Big Jim Murphy is no longer co-hosting. It's just ol' Kaleb and you good people for the forseeable future. Maybe the weather will change and Big Jim will come back. Maybe he'll even be replaced by somebody in a few months. Who knows. But for now we're going to figure out how to make this work as a solo show.

Jim will still be here for every episode, hopefully, as a sketch partner. We'll write a whole mess of sketches and bank two or three months worth pretty soon. It wasn't a falling out or anything that caused this, you know - just a scheduling problem that no longer seemed correctable.

Anyway, I guess I can quit doing that fake third person thing where I pretend I'm an anonymous editor. Here's what I did this week.

I wrote and read a short story. It was a rough draft but I had to replace the slot where a sketch would normally go and didn't have a whole bunch of time to do it. I'll try to avoid doing those again. I don't know how short stories work as a literary form. I just like telling rambling pseudo-campfire stories.

I explain how I'll try and make the show evolve as a one-man operation. Guest host possibilities etc.

I also talk a lot, a lot, about diners and Buddy Guy. But it's not what I'm talking about, you know, it's how I'm talking about it. Personality and narrative cohesion and tone and melody and all this. It doesn't matter that these topics are irrelevant. Relevance doesn't matter. Don't you understand? That's what I've been trying to do for years. I've been trying to say that the news cycle doesn't matter; that we're allowed to talk about old and boring things; that we shouldn't have to try and engineer social capital through manipulation of the ~thought marketplace~ and Google rankings.

Damn it. I'm sorry I wrote all that. It's 2:30 in the morning and I'm waiting to get my brother up for his shift and I can sure type, it just doesn't come out lucid. Time to pack it in. Y'all take care now.

Show: Kaleb rambles around through Bakersfield and the most nowhere parts of Los Angeles County he can find. This leads to a confrontation at a motel. We talk about the rights of photographers, resolving conflict with the potential of violence, The Twilight Zone, Tripadvisor, and old timey apocalyptic rhetoric from presidents.

James reads a commercial for the first time ever. It's worth it. Trust us.

Kaleb did up a sketch this week that was basically an excuse to try out his Billy Bob Thornton impression. He won't do it again, maybe.

As for the rest of the show, I'm sick. Leave me alone. It's people talking. There's some movie talking, some funny talking, some sad talking, even some sports talking. It all looks the same on the editing chart. Listen to it and tell your friends and quit pressuring me all day into coming up with professional, on-brand episode summaries. I don't get paid for these.

Note: James' Audacity crashed so he had to pull his side of the episode off Skype, and it doesn't sound as good as usual. Just let it happen. We're here. We do our thing. Sometimes we ain't as Hollywood as them Hollywood types, but at least we're not hunkered down in coat closets.

Anyway, there are two sketches. James did up the first one and Kaleb did up the second one. James' is about a traveling salesman, and Kaleb's is a parody of Clint Eastwood's American Sniper. Oh, and Kaleb tried recording standing up, so we'll find out if that worked.

There's also some talk about old movies, the freemasons, whatever. Content. Get at that content.

Bit of a comedown from James interviewing Keith Levene, but anything would be.

Anyway, this is Kaleb going it alone for a full-blown hour. Theoretically it's an attempt to do an actual solo show, with as little artifice as possible.

There's a short story Kaleb wrote at the beginning, then some talk about what happened over the holidays, the 2015 Hollywood black list, the Freemasons, and a whole bunch of movies. Kaleb's been watching movies apparently. Outrageous.

Sketch: James goes back to that ol' bar in Death Valley. This one's probably gonna have an arc.

Show: We recap whatever happened in 2014. Favorite music and movies and whatever else it is we talk about.

P.S. Nobody listened to the last episode, so here's an unpersuasive suggestion for you to tell all your friends about all this content we do here. We write and do impressions and sing and dance and it's really a complete package of entertainment.